Even as indoor dining restrictions start to relax, carryout remains the name of the game. After a year of enjoying restaurant-quality meals from the comfort of home, consumer desire for safety and convenience hasn’t wavered. Currently, 92% of restaurants and 60% of on-site operators are offering takeout.¹ and 53% of adults say purchasing takeout or delivery food is essential to the way they live.² Handhelds and portable menu items like chicken sandwiches, burrito bowls, dumplings and burgers all showed strong performance as some of the top dishes for delivery in 2020, demonstrating triple-digit growth over 2019.³
 
Operators continue to make dining more convenient for guests, offering curbside pickup, dedicated walk-up windows and seamless digital ordering. The buzz around delivery-only ghost kitchens seems to get louder every day, with Euromonitor forecasting the global ghost kitchen market to reach $1 trillion in the next decade.⁴ But with reliance on carryout and delivery comes the need for tamper-proof packaging that’s lightweight yet durable, affordable and environmentally friendly. Innovation in the plant-based packaging space may uncover new solutions that maintain the integrity of delivery dishes while demonstrating an operator’s commitment to sustainability.

HOW CONVENIENT! 

3 unique ways to reconfigure carryout and delivery menu items

growth vs. prior year. Spicy chicken sandwiches were the top-ordered
delivery dish on Grubhub in 2020.³

growth in popularity for
spicy tonkotsu ramen
on Grubhub between 2019 and 2020.³

increase in orders of fried chicken wings
on Grubhub from 2019 to 2020.⁵

#takeout showcases over 2.8 million photos on Instagram of consumers’ favorite restaurant meals enjoyed at home. National campaigns and community programs, including Takeout Tuesday and Great American Takeout, help to boost business in a time when in-unit dining is subject to capacity restrictions.⁶

Certification from the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, ensures that products come from responsibly managed forests that provide environmental, social and economic benefits.

In 2020, 92% of the paper or fiber-based packaging for bags and corrugate boxes used by our parent company Griffith Foods was FSC certified. We are working to achieve 100% FSC certification as well as to make sure that those packaging materials are 100% recyclable.

Sources